Steve Ballmer's annual letter to shareholders makes it very clear Microsoft is at a point of no return - and in the middle of a transition into a hardware company. "This is a significant shift, both in what we do and how we see ourselves - as a devices and services company. It impacts how we run the company, how we develop new experiences, and how we take products to market for both consumers and businesses." Line. Sand.

I have to disagree on that. Some features still come first to the Mac, but take less time to be copied by other manufacturer (not complaining about it, this is actually a good thing from my POV).

-"Ultrabook" form factor since 2008 (differ from previous ultra portable effort)
-Multitouch touchpad. OSX is still the king there, other OS integration is "there" but lacking in term of application adoption and use.
-Backlit keyboard, while I am not sure if it was unique, it was the first mainstream use of it I saw.
-Highres display. Older Macs used to trail behind, but the new Retina effort is quickly giving Apple the top position for _mainstream_ laptops.
-Sensors, they had most of them first, then everybody else followed.
-Remote control. Well, that was useless and there was an old hack dating to the 90's to add it to any laptop by forking the internal RS232 connector, Apple supported it until the new Retina MBP.
-OpenCL. Apple was quite an early adopter of it as a core part of the OS
-Modern compositing. While Amiga has it, it was not until Apple implemented it that it became as essential as it is today in modern OS/DE (kudo to the KDE devs not to require it, but I am referring to OSX, Win and iOS).
-Metal chassis. Again, not new, but done in a new way.

That said, many OEM (as in non-Apple) innovate too, against usually Apple fanboy thinking, the dented fruit giant is not the greatest innovator of all time. But saying MBP are just usual laptop is still a bit wrong. They definitively have an unjustified premium on the price, but are the best laptop if you want the latest and hottest gadget.

/Flames on I guess, but it is not my intention. I just share my opinion as mostly a Linux user, but getting Apple laptop from time to time as they make, in my opinion, the best. I had some Apple, Toshiba, Acer, Asus, Compaq (pre-HP), Hp, IBM and Lenovo too. The old Compad Armada E500, both Mac, the IBM thinkpad and the first Asus EeePC survived. all other died before their time. I managed to _MELT_ the Acer to death when rendering a video, I hope they got better by now. The Toshiba "lived" 9 months out of the 3 years warranty period, it was in repair (shipped) the rest of the time. It just could not survive more than 3 month without an internal cable broke, chip unsoldered off the motherboard or the HDD needle got stuck (no, it was not stationary, since when laptop are supposed to be). Even the plastic case had a recall.

So, my tendency to pay the premium may come from those bad experiences, I may have a bias here.